Brothers In Arms

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Hope for stopping the advance of the German fleet came to rest on the rapid modification of the infantry's existing M-2 medium tanks. The cavalry's light tanks were too thinly armored to withstand the German tank guns (though they proved useful in reconnaissance, and were deployed to great effect against Japanese infantry in the Pacific). The M-2 medium's 37mm cannon would clearly be no match against the 3.5-inch German armor. A 75mm cannon already in the Detroit Chrysler arsenal was mounted on the body of the M-2. With further modifications, including thicker armor and a turret that could rotate on a 360-degree axis, this became the M-4 Sherman. The first Shermans were deployed in combat by the British in North Africa in September 1942, and by the Americans in Tunisia in December; pitted against the Panzers, they achieved at best only bloody stalemates. Allied tankers shared stories of watching in horror as their 75mm shells bounced harmlessly off the sides of German tanks. Members of the U.S. Armored Force argued for replacing the Sherman with the prototype M-26 Pershing, a forty-two-ton tank with an improved suspension system that carried thicker armor and a 90mm cannon.

  A command decision was made, by Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair among others, to continue with the Sherman. Army doctrine held that head-to-head combat against Panzers would be the function of tank destroyers, not of tanks. While tank destroyers (lightly armored vehicles with high-range, high-velocity guns) held off the German tanks, the Shermans—in theory—would spread out to make sudden, surprise spearheads across enemy infantry lines, and in its intended role the Sherman was believed to hold the advantage over the prototype M-26 because of its greater mobility. The Sherman's relative lightness also made it easier to manufacture and ship overseas in bulk. The prototype M-26 was shelved. By the summer of 1942, more than 2,000 Sherman tanks were being produced in Detroit each month.

  HEADING BACK TO THE MOTOR POOL from the tank range at Camp Hood, William McBurney constantly pestered Willie Devore to let him take the driver's seat. There were “governors” inside the Sherman's engine to limit training speeds to a maximum of twenty-five miles per hour, but it had taken the men only a day or two to figure out how to disable them. Without governors, the 32-ton vehicles could fly. It was an incredibly powerful feeling. Battalion tanks would race each other back to the motor pool doing forty to fifty miles an hour.

  The young soldiers found themselves spending most of their time at Camp Hood inside their new tanks in the scorching Texas heat. On its arrival at Hood in the fall of 1943, the 761st was designated the “enemy” in maneuvers. It performed the crucial function of “school troops”—in essence, playing the Germans—for the tank destroyer units that rotated through the camp in the final weeks before those units were shipped overseas and into combat. As a result, the men were on near-constant maneuvers both on the base and throughout the surrounding Texas countryside, learning to master their M-4 Shermans under simulated battle conditions.

  The Sherman tank was operated by a five-man crew: a tank commander, gunner, bow gunner, driver, and loader (in the light tank, the commander doubled as loader). The men kept positions comparable to those they'd held in the M-5 Stuarts: William McBurney was a gunner. Leonard Smith, with his continued knack for staying in trouble with officers and sergeants, found himself situated in the most thankless position of a tank crew, that of loader. Standing in the left rear of the turret, the loader followed the gunner or tank commander's orders as to which type of ammunition to pull off storage on the floors and walls and load into the cannon. He also had to eject the spent shell casings out of a small side hatch. Typically, the loader worked like hell in battle; as fast as he could load the shells and duck away from the cannon's recoil, the gunner would fire and demand another.

  The tank commander sat or stood in the right rear of the turret. He wore radio headphones through which he remained in constant contact with platoon and company commanders. He communicated with his own crew via a handheld microphone, as the Sherman's engine made so much noise that even yelling at the top of his lungs he might not have been heard. He could fire the .50-caliber machine gun attached to the turret roof, turning it upward if necessary for antiaircraft use. The tank commander had the best periscope, with the widest field of vision. Except during heavy combat when the tank was “buttoned up”—the turret hatch closed, to guard against artillery bursts and mortar fire—he rode with his head and shoulders sticking out the top of the turret for an even better field of view. On maneuvers in the Texas heat, though ordered to button up for combat simulations, tank commanders usually left the hatches open. The inside of the tank could get as hot as an oven.

  The gunner sat just in front of the tank commander. His vision was limited to the window of a periscope and a small telescopic sight on the turret. He couldn't see much of anything, and he depended on the eyes of the tank commander, who'd tell him to rotate the turret, say, thirty degrees right or sixty degrees left, and then order, “Hit that half-track over there,” or “Get that sniper in the tower.” After firing, the tank commander would tell him if the round fell short or long so he could raise or lower his aim to correct. The gunner could fire either the 75mm cannon or the coaxial .30-caliber machine gun. To preserve his 75mm shells, the gunner would often use the machine gun as a tracer, judging by where those bullets struck whether or not he had his target locked.

  The bow gunner rode in the right front hull of the tank and controlled a .30-caliber machine gun. The driver was positioned in the left front hull of the tank. The bow gunner and driver entered and exited through their own hatches; when the tank was buttoned up, each had the use of a periscope. Like the tank commander, when the Sherman was not in combat the two would frequently stand with their heads and shoulders protruding from the hatches for better vision.

  The task of driving could be physically exhausting. The Sherman didn't have a steering wheel but rather two levers, right and left, which, when pushed or pulled, would stop the movement of their respective tracks on the undercarriage. To turn right, the driver would pull the right lever, stopping the right tracks while the left continued to rotate. To turn left, he did the opposite. To shift gears to increase or decrease the vehicle's speed, the driver had to double-clutch, pushing down with his full weight on two pedals. At just 135 pounds, Leonard Smith had trouble managing it. But like William McBurney, he constantly pestered the driver of his tank, Hollis Clark, for the chance to race the Sherman back from the range. The thrill was worth the effort.

  The shift in the 761st's principal equipment from light to M-4 medium tanks was accompanied by a battalion reorganization. The 761st still contained Headquarters Company, Service Company, and Able, Baker, and Charlie Companies; but an additional letter company was added, consisting of fifteen of the old light tanks. Dog Company would be used primarily for reconnaissance missions. The Sherman tankers, proud of their new equipment, couldn't help but tease Dog Company's members a bit—calling the light tanks the “mosquito fleet” because of their small size, and referring to the 37mm guns as “pea shooters” next to the 75mm cannons. On maneuvers, however, they learned the critical role light tanks could play in a mission's success or failure. Battalion officers, fully aware of this, transferred two of the battalion's most responsible members, Warren Crecy and soft-spoken Preston McNeil, into Dog Company to serve as tank commanders and platoon leaders.

  WHEN THE MEN RECEIVED PASSES to travel off base, they tended to avoid the nearby town of Killeen. After a few times, even the adventuresome Leonard Smith refused to take his chances there. Local whites wouldn't just glare at the men, as in Alexandria; they'd shout epithets out the windows of their cars. There was no black side of town: African Americans had been openly discouraged from living in Killeen since its founding in the late 1800s (the town would have no black residents until after 1950). Instead, during their travels off base, members of the 761st went to the towns of Lampasas, Belton, and Temple, or traveled the eighty miles to Austin, where there was a USO for African American soldiers. Black soldiers didn't have any trouble in Austin as long as t
hey kept to their side of the city.

  Travel, however, could prove troublesome. Preston McNeil had grown up in the segregated South: Knowing the injustice of its various laws and codes, he nonetheless accepted them as a part of life. But the constant mistreatment he received from white bus drivers at Camp Hood infuriated even him. The back seats of the buses, where black soldiers were forced to ride, held six to eight people. Civilian bus drivers insisted there be six black soldiers present at the base bus stop before they'd let any blacks on. Even a group of five soldiers would be told they had to wait. McNeil, wearing the uniform of his country, had no choice but to stand and wait while busloads of white soldiers and white civilian employees came and went.

  Trying to make it back to the base could be even worse. The last bus back at night was always full of soldiers. Several bus drivers made a regular practice of stopping the bus when they were still two or three miles from the post, suddenly announcing that the vehicle was overloaded and ordering the black soldiers off. Leonard Smith found the walk back far from pleasant. Watching the taillights of the bus recede, he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Even with a group of friends around him, he didn't feel quite safe. There weren't any streetlights to speak of. On the rare occasions when car headlights approached, he felt a quick tightening of his stomach. He refused to hide or crouch out of sight—but he was well aware that in this part of the country anything could happen to him. After a hard day of maneuvers, heading toward the start of another such day, it could feel like a very long walk home.

  THE YOUNG TANKERS DEVELOPED a fierce sense of proprietorship toward their vehicles, akin to a teenager's outsized feeling of ownership toward his first car. Most of the 761st's members were, in fact, still teenagers. But the Sherman tank—at twenty feet by nine feet by eleven feet—was cooler by far than any car any of them would ever own. Leonard Smith loved to stand in front of his Sherman, looking up at its turret, thinking, “This is mine.” Smith had never before gone out of his way to seek extra duty, but he chose to stay late in the motor pool, cleaning the tank, checking its tracks, making sure that all its component parts were well-oiled. The men hadn't given names to the M-5 Stuarts in which they'd trained, but they named their Shermans. In Headquarters Company, William McBurney's tank was the tank Lt. Col. Paul Bates would command on the battlefield. Bates named the vehicle after his girlfriend, “Taffy.” McBurney might have preferred something with a bit more of an edge: Other tanks carried monikers like “Thunderbolt,” “Hurricane,” and “Widow Maker.” The irrepressible Leonard Smith's tank was christened “Cool Stud.”

  When they were first assigned the Shermans at Camp Hood, the men were told that these were the vehicles they'd drive if the battalion went to combat. But as the months passed, the prospect that the battalion would experience real combat seemed increasingly remote. While the white tank destroyer units against which they were pitted rotated regularly through Camp Hood to be shipped overseas, the 761st received no such orders. In Texas, as in Louisiana, they couldn't help but overhear the derisive term by which many whites, including some of their own officers, referred to them—“Mrs. Roosevelt's Niggers,” a designation referring to the First Lady's continued insistence in the press that blacks be given the opportunity to fight on equal footing. The phrase implied that the 761st was a mascot existing only for show, that they weren't going anywhere.

  Training periods for armored units varied greatly in duration, depending on the date of their creation and the theater of operations for which they were intended. Tank units that were authorized, like the 761st, after America's official entrance into the war rarely trained in the States for more than a year. Some were shipped overseas to North Africa and the Mediterranean, some to the Pacific, some to England to train in preparation for the invasion of Europe. By the winter of 1943, the 761st Tank Battalion had been in existence for twenty months, and no arrangements were being made on any level of command for its deployment. The men continued to listen to what war updates they could (information was restricted for units in training), but they had less and less of a sense that they themselves would become directly involved. For Leonard Smith, William McBurney, and Preston McNeil, who had volunteered with such high hopes, the feeling that the battalion would not get the chance to fight was deeply disappointing.

  AMERICA'S OVERARCHING BATTLE PLANS for the remainder of the war had been firmly established at a conference in Teheran, Iran, in the four days from November 28 to December 1, 1943, the first official meeting of Allied leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. By this time, after a series of bitter desert battles in 1942 and early 1943—including El Alamein, Kasserine Pass, Tunis, and Bizerta—American and British forces had succeeded in pushing the Germans out of North Africa and Tunisia. They continued to wage a costly campaign against German forces in Italy, launching numerous unsuccessful assaults against a defensive perimeter known as the “Winter Line” near Cassino and Anzio. In 1942, Russia had come close to losing Moscow to the invading Germans but had succeeded in turning the tide after brutal fighting at Stalingrad and Kursk, and was making plans for its own large-scale offensive. In the Pacific theater of operations, American and Japanese forces were at a stalemate, though America seemed finally to be gaining momentum after tough naval and infantry battles from Guadalcanal to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea.

  The three heads of state meeting in Teheran had varied, at times conflicting, strategic interests: Stalin wanted supplies from America and Britain to fill his vastly depleted arsenals, and he pushed for a second front in Europe to relieve pressure from the Soviets; the British, depending for many of their supplies on colonies accessed through the Suez Canal, wanted to maintain a heavy presence in the Mediterranean; the Americans wanted to contain and roll back the Japanese presence in the Pacific, and also pushed for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe to be launched at the earliest possible date, believing that such an assault would bring the war against Germany to the quickest end. At the conclusion of the Teheran Conference, the Allies agreed that the Americans and British would together carry out a massive invasion across the English Channel in the spring of 1944; in exchange for continued British and American support, Stalin would commit the Soviet Union to fight against Japan when the war in Europe was over; and the Americans would continue fighting in Italy, though limiting the scale of these operations in favor of the European invasion.

  ALTHOUGH THEY HAD COME TO BELIEVE that it was unlikely they would see combat, the men of the 761st were determined to train hard—to prove that they could fight. In their ongoing, at times seemingly endless, maneuvers at Camp Hood through the winter and early spring of 1944, they were becoming a crack outfit. The crews of the M-4 Shermans became expert at judging terrain and spotting threats peculiar to tanks: ground that could be heavily mined—a tactic at which the Germans were particularly adept—and “tank traps,” trenches dug in the ground and covered with branches and dirt that the heavy tanks would sink into and be unable to maneuver out of. Such traps were almost always watched by hidden tank destroyers, gun emplacements, or concealed infantry holding bazookas.

  Each of the battalion's companies had its outstanding performers. In Dog Company, the platoon commanded by the tough, determined Warren Crecy executed scouting and screening maneuvers with particular distinction. In Headquarters Company, the assault gun platoon—a platoon consisting of five 105mm howitzers mounted on M-4 Sherman chassis—commanded by Leonard Smith's mentor, Charles “Pop” Gates, destroyed its assigned targets with such pinpoint accuracy that a visiting white colonel who had fought extensively in North Africa chose to stay with the unit for several weeks, working with them on a hillside in the dry Texas heat. He arranged for Pop Gates's crews to get extra ammunition so that they could further perfect the art of shooting indirect fire, a technique using mathematical calculations and forward spotters to hit targets the gunners could not see.

  As “school troops,” the Sherman crews of the 761st had been instructed
not to hold any punches, to perform to the best of their ability in order to provide the tank destroyers with the highest possible level of combat training. They took this instruction quite literally, regularly outmaneuvering the tank destroyer teams. Lt. Col. Paul Bates, who had continued his practice of living on the post and spending time with the soldiers, greatly admired and took pride in the accomplishments of his men. When Bates was walking through the motor pool one afternoon, he overheard a group around one of the tanks laughing loudly. He asked the soldiers what they were laughing about. The Tank Destroyer motto at the time was “Seek, Strike and Destroy.” One of the men told him, “You know what those tank destroyers call themselves? . . . When we appear it is ‘Sneak, Peek and Retreat'!”

  The commander of Headquarters Company, Capt. Ivan Harrison, worked together with battalion members to come up with an official insignia and motto for the 761st. The insignia of the tank destroyer force at the time was a black panther crushing a tank in its jaws. The men drew from this, choosing for their own insignia a snarling black panther. German tanks were known as “Panzers” or “Panthers,” and (with typical GI swagger) the battalion's M-4 Sherman tankers considered themselves more than a match for the enemy, hence the name “black panthers.”

  For their unit motto, they decided on “Come Out Fighting.” It was taken from a quote by boxer Joe Louis, who had been foremost among the heroes of many of the men when they were growing up, and it conveyed their sense of themselves as scrappy, underestimated underdogs. In his second match against German Max Schmeling in 1938—a match widely touted by the press as a test of democracy against fascism—Joe Louis had destroyed his opponent, knocking him out in the first round. No one had thought beforehand that he had a chance of winning. Asked just prior to the match by reporters how he was going to fight Schmeling, Louis said, “I'm going to come out fighting!”